25 June 2015

SO YOU WANT TO BE AN INDIAN ARMED FORCES EXPERT?

Peter Mattis’ explanation of what one should read to be anexpert on China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) made me wonder: What might a similar list look like for India-watchers? Western interest in India’s armed forces is considerably slighter, largely because India looms far smaller in U.S. strategic thinking and is viewed as a potential partner rather than probable military adversary. But there’s a large and growing volume of writing on Indian military affairs, almost all of it in English, with cutting-edge books or articles appearing every month. So where should one begin?

Each service has its own doctrine and/or strategy — most recently the army in 2004, the navy in 2007 (remarkably, it is not available online), and the air force in 2012 (the official link is — perhaps aptly — perpetually broken, but you can get it here) — but these are of limited use, not least because they’re not written in close coordination with other services or with a coherent national military strategy in mind. So most analyses depend on secondary texts, occasional statements by serving officers, and writing by retirees.

On the Indian army, must-read articles include Walter Ladwig’s important account (2007) of the Indian army’s much misunderstood limited war doctrine, and his more recent argument in the Journal of Strategic Studies (2015) that India’s conventional military advantage over Pakistan has been greatly overstated, which built on Chris Clary’s own analysis of South Asia’s military balance in an edited volume for the Stimson Center,Deterrence Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia.

The Indian navy is deservedly receiving increasing attention. Harsh Pant’s edited volume The Rise of the Indian Navy (2012) has some valuable essays in it, especially Ladwig’s careful parsing of the fleet. James Holmes, Andrew Winner, and Toshi Yoshihara’s Indian Naval Strategy in the Twenty-first Century (2009) is a very useful single-volume survey. Ladwig’s “India and Military Power Projection” (2010) is an article-length stock-take of capabilities, though much has changed in the last five years. Of the recent crop of writing, Iskander Rehman has written a wide-ranging report for Carnegie on naval nuclear dynamics in the Indian Ocean, and a shorter piece for The National Interest on weaknesses in Indian anti-submarine warfare, both excellent. Frank O’Donnell and Yogesh Joshi have also written for Survival on India’s SSBN force.

Air Force

The Indian air force isn’t as well studied as the navy, but there are a few very good pieces. In 2011, the prolific Ashley Tellis wrote a detailed report for Carnegie on India’s bid for a multi-role combat aircraft — since settled in favor of the Dassault Rafale — with plenty of technical details to chew over. Also for Carnegie, Ben Lambeth’s Airpower at 18,000’ (2012) is a valuable account of the role that airpower played during Kargil, with important lessons for how it might be employed in the future. More recently, George Perkovich and Toby Dalton look at India’s ability to conduct airstrikes against Pakistan in the Washington Quarterly (2015). Abhijit Iyer-Mitra’s forthcoming Carnegie monograph on technology, airpower, and escalation will also be worth reading.

For shorter reads, see Narang’s provocative essay in the Washington Quarterly (2013) on five myths about India’s nuclear posture, Gaurav Kampani’s concise overview in Strategic Asia 2013-14, and Hans Kristensen’s warning (2013) that India is surpassing minimum deterrence. The former head of India’s Strategic Forces Command (SFC) and present director of the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), B.S. Nagal, has written a series of pieces for India’s Force magazine (in June and October 2014, unfortunately pay-walled), with some radical arguments. Another former SFC commander, Vijay Shankar, has also written and spoken on this subject. Bharat Karnad’s idiosyncratic India’s Nuclear Policy (2008) is worth a look, as is Rajesh Basrur’s Minimum Deterrence and India’s Nuclear Security (2006) and Scott Sagan’s chapter on the evolution of India’s nuclear doctrine, in his own edited volume Inside Nuclear South Asia (2009).

Formal study of India’s military isn’t at the same stage of maturity as that of the PLA. The most useful Indian sources — which vary greatly in quality — tend to be a small cluster of retired officers rather than scholars with academic training, and much of the Western literature still needs to be grounded in better military understanding. Western military research institutes — parts of RAND, the NDU, the Army War College — that dominate Peter Mattis’ reading list aren’t as interested in India, and Indian research institutes don’t yet have the capacity. But a wave of insightful and important articles and books, many by young scholars, is laying a solid foundation on which to build.

There remain important gaps to plug: How do Indian elites think about specific technologies, such as ballistic missile defense or the role of cruise missiles in wartime? How has the IAF’s thinking about airpower evolved over the past decade, and what lessons have they learnt from recent Western campaigns? How does India see the future structure and strategy of its mountain strike corps? Is India fixing its broken procurement system, or papering over the problems with slogans and big-ticket purchases? How does the Indian navy plan to organize and deploy its future carrier groups in a region where anti-access platforms may be spreading? Have Indian civil-military relations really come under “unprecedented stress?” As international interest in India grows, hopefully these and other topics will be given the attention they deserve.

Shashank Joshi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government, Harvard University.